A game that supports but doesn't actually require DirectX9 will run on your video card. For example, Far Cry will look better in DirectX 9 but it doesn't NEED it to run, hence it will run on your video card.
I think you have confused the DirectX9 DRIVER with the hardware portion aka Shader Model 2.0. If you don't have at least a Shader Model 2.0 card (The Radeon 9000 is limited to Shader 1.4) downloading the DirectX 9 driver will be useless for the most part, except for improving compatibility (yet such programs are not 3D intensive). It's complicated.
For example, my video card is a DirectX 9c (shader model 3.0). I can download the DirectX 10 driver, but it will do nothing other than occupy hard drive space unless I actually have a DirectX 10 shader model 4.0 video card.
Halo 2 MUST have at least Direct X 9 (that is, shader model 2.0) to even run. I know it's ridiculous considering that it doesn't even take full advantage of the shader, but that's how it is.
Try whatever you want. Even if you install Vista, you won't be running Halo 2 PC.
The reason why you can run the H2X modding program is because H2Xbox is coded for a DirectX8.0 (shader 1.1) card (the xbox's video card is similar to a Geforce 4 Ti) and therefore viewing/modding H2X content on your laptop is no problem.
Trust me, a number of users here own Radeon 9250s, which are better than the Radeon 9000, and yet they can't run H2V or any of the fancy visual stuff in Vista (that means that the Aero Glass and all that won't work if Vista is installed with such cards).
Bookmarks